Just so happens I have a story about Mr. Salinger:
When I was 24 and a junior in college I was walking past the school dorms on a summer, Winnie the Pooh type day. I still remember what the sky looked like, blue with fluffy white clouds.
At that moment, I had a tremendous epiphany. I realized the depths of my ignorance were profound. I remember to this day saying to myself: "I not only do not know the answers, I do not know the questions and specifically I had no idea why Plato was an important person".
I knew only that there was something important to understand which I did not understand, and I did not have a clue what it was or where to find it?
I had a nice quiet apartment with a wonderful comfortable couch on which to lie, and read with the door open as it was warm and so I spent a two year journey to understand what ever it was I was not seeing.
I did not know where to start. So I started at the beginning i.e. I started reading the people considered important authors. Steinbeck, Hemingway, F.Scott Fitsgerald and William Faulkner. They wrote nice stories, but I did not see anything I felt would answer my question. They did not read like Plato.
Then I read "Catcher in the Rye" and after that, everything else he wrote". I did not understand him, but I knew this was part of what I was searching for. Whatever it was.
After that I jumped the atlantic ocean and ran into Tolstoy, Doestevsky, Nietzsche, Baudelair, Voltair, Russel, Whitehead, Huxley and finally Camus and Sartre. I had arrived at my destination.
I discovered I had always been an existentialist and it explained my disagreements with my fellow man, but liberated me from my self doubt and insecurity at being so often at odds with my culture, as I saw there were other people who saw the world as did I.
But is was J.D Salinger who first opened the door and gave me a peek at the unfathomable world of higher understanding and knowledge directed perception.
>> was reading the Boston Globe this morning - piece about J.D. Salinger and how the his neighbors in Cornish N.H. looked out for him and protected him from hundreds of visitors sometimes offering mis-directions to reporters and fans wishing to meet him.....and thought of you...it goes:
"The writer John Updike once praised Salinger's short stories for the 'Zen quality they have'. Salinger himself might have appreciated how the best approach to spotting him had the paradox of a Zen koan. If you did not go looking for him, he was there. If you did, he was not." |
